VANITY FAIR: Steve Bannon Thinks an Increasingly Unhinged Trump Risks Not Making it a Full Term

Trump will have to send out Steve Bannon to give a press briefing, in order to dispute this, but if this is true, it’s not like Bannon didn’t warn him.

According to a Vanity Fair report, President Trump is unraveling at a rapid rate.

Basically, everything that Senator Bob Corker has been alluding to is pretty much true, and then some. The picture being painted by those close to the president are of the “old-man-shouts-at-cloud” variety.

In recent days, I spoke with a half dozen prominent Republicans and Trump advisers, and they all describe a White House in crisis as advisers struggle to contain a president who seems to be increasingly unfocused and consumed by dark moods. Trump’s ire is being fueled by his stalled legislative agenda and, to a surprising degree, by his decision last month to back the losing candidate Luther Strange in the Alabama Republican primary. “Alabama was a huge blow to his psyche,” a person close to Trump said. “He saw the cult of personality was broken.”

I had said before the Alabama primary race that the outcome would prove if Trump had the pull or if the real mystique belonged to Steve Bannon.

According to two sources familiar with the conversation, Trump vented to his longtime security chief, Keith Schiller, “I hate everyone in the White House! There are a few exceptions, but I hate them!” (A White House official denies this.) Two senior Republican officials said Chief of Staff John Kelly is miserable in his job and is remaining out of a sense of duty to keep Trump from making some sort of disastrous decision. Today, speculation about Kelly’s future increased after Politico reported that Kelly’s deputy Kirstjen Nielsen is likely to be named Homeland Security Secretary—the theory among some Republicans is that Kelly wanted to give her a soft landing before his departure.

Trump is running out of allies. Schiller is gone, John Kelly, as has been reported, is miserable, and even a longtime friend, Thomas Barrack is expressing shock and disappointment with Trump’s behavior.

Kelly is restricting calls and visitors into the Oval Office, and Trump is only doing fluff TV pieces for now, with bootlickers like Sean Hannity and Mike Huckabee.

Most damning, however, are the thoughts of Steve Bannon.

Even before Corker’s remarks, some West Wing advisers were worried that Trump’s behavior could cause the Cabinet to take extraordinary Constitutional measures to remove him from office. Several months ago, according to two sources with knowledge of the conversation, former chief strategist Steve Bannon told Trump that the risk to his presidency wasn’t impeachment, but the 25th Amendment—the provision by which a majority of the Cabinet can vote to remove the president. When Bannon mentioned the 25th Amendment, Trump said, “What’s that?” According to a source, Bannon has told people he thinks Trump has only a 30 percent chance of making it the full term.

Is that because Bannon knows the man is unstable?

He certainly has a glaring lack of knowledge about the Constitution of the nation he was elected to lead.

Either way, only so many of these stories can come out before it becomes difficult to keep blowing them off.